The Luka Rocco Magnotta case: When life — and death — imitate art

Jay Stone, Postmedia News06.04.2012

Did the plot points of the 1992 thriller Basic Instinct, starring Sharon Stone, infiltrate the real world through the grisly case of Luka Magnotta, the man accused of killing and mutilating a Chinese student in Montreal?

Related

One weekend in 1995, two Oklahoma teenagers took LSD and watched the movie Natural Born Killers, the story of two psychopathic killers who go on a killing spree and become media celebrities. Two days later, the teenagers went on a similar road trip, murdering a man name William Savage in Mississippi and critically wounding a convenience store clerk named Patsy Byers in Louisiana.

Byers, who was rendered a quadriplegic by the shooting, was a friend of novelist John Grisham. On her behalf, Grisham accused Oliver Stone, the director of Natural Born Killers — which was based on a story by Quentin Tarantino — of being irresponsible. “A case can be made that there exists a direct causal link between Natural Born Killers and the death of Bill Savage,” Grisham wrote in a magazine article.

Byers sued Stone and the Warner Bros. studio, saying the movie inspired the violence that injured her. The case was eventually dismissed.

Natural Born Killers would go on to be linked to several more real-life crimes, most famously the shootings at Columbine high school in Colorado where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who massacred 12 students and a teacher, wrote in their diary that they were “going NBK.”

It was not the first time a movie was the inspiration — or the excuse, or just the stylistic pattern — for actual atrocity, nor was it the last.

The latest is the murder of a Chinese student in Montreal, a horrific crime with disturbing echoes of the psychosexual 1992 film Basic Instinct. In it, Sharon Stone plays Catherine Tramell, a novelist who kills a lover with an ice pick and later says, “Killing isn’t like smoking. You can stop.”

In Montreal, Jun Lin was tied to the bed, sexually assaulted and then stabbed with an ice pick. The man arrested for the crime, Luka Rocco Magnotta, once wrote a letter that said, “Killing is different from smoking . . . with smoking you can stop.”

There are several other parallels between Basic Instinct and the life of Magnotta uncovered by National Post writer Adrian Humphreys: in a 2008 blog, for instance, he talks about watching the movie with his stepmother, and one of his apparent online pseudonyms is Katherine Tramell.

Such copycat details have a gruesome history, and they’re often linked to the fact that the perpetrators are looking for a measure of celebrity, just like the people in the movies.

The combination of fame and violence was especially lethal in Natural Born Killers because it was part of the film’s structure: in one real-life case, a 14-year-old boy beheaded a 13-year-old girl and said later he wanted to be famous “just like Natural Born Killers.” It’s one of several ironies that the movie itself was based on real-life couple Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, teenagers who murdered 11 people on a bloody road trip through Nebraska and Wyoming in the 1950s (their story had been told previously in the Terrence Malick film Badlands).

Of course, many people watch these movies and commit no crimes, but some filmmakers worry about the effect their work can have. When the dystopian drama A Clockwork Orange was released in 1971, it unleashed several copycat crimes, including the gang rape of a girl by a gang of British youths who sang Singin’ in the Rain, just like the movie’s violent anti-hero. Director Stanley Kubrick subsequently withdrew the movie from circulation in Britain. After it was released on DVD, a so-called Clockwork Orange Gang murdered a bar manager.

Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver apparently inspired another unhinged man to seek fame, although John Hinckley Jr. was also looking for love. In the movie, the character of Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, tries to assassinate a presidential candidate. Hinckley, who watched Taxi Driver on a continuous loop, decided to assassinate Ronald Reagan and wounded him in a 1981 attack outside a hotel in Washington, D.C. He said he was trying to impress the actress Jodie Foster, who plays the young prostitute rescued by Bickle in Taxi Driver.

The Child's Play series — horror films featuring a malevolent doll called Chucky — has been linked to more than three dozen murders. In 1996, an Australian mental patient named Martin Bryant who was obsessed with Chucky killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania. In court, his obsession with the movies was cited as a contributing factor. In 1992, a teenage girl was burned alive in Manchester by killers who chanted lines adapted from the Chucky movie — “I’m Chucky. Chucky wants to play” — as she was being tortured. In 1993, two Liverpool boys who were fans of the Chucky movies abducted two-year-old James Bulger and stoned him to death.

The 1965 British movie The Collector — in which a lonely man named Freddie (Terence Stamp) kidnaps beautiful art student Miranda (Samantha Eggar) and holds her hostage in a twisted version of love — has connections to the crimes of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng. In a plot he described in his diary as Operation Miranda, the pair kidnapped two women and held them in a hidden bunker to be their sex slaves. They were later found to have killed 25 people in a hidden bunker in the woods.

Neither The Collector nor the John Fowles book on which it was based contain this kind of sexual violence: the links between films and real-life crime can be illusory. In the 1995 film The Basketball Diaries, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a drug addict who dreams of putting on a trench coat, going into his classroom and murdering his fellow students. That image began to echo through several school killings: in 1996, for instance, a teenager named Barry Loukaitis went into his school wearing a trench coat and killed three people. He said he had been inspired by the Stephen King novel Rage, in which a character kills two teachers.

The long coat also became associated with the Columbine killers, who were known as the Trench Coat Mafia. But the early panic that also linked them to Goth culture and violent video games was dismissed by FBI investigators who found Harris and Klebold dreamt of blowing up the school and creating an apocalypse. Like many killers who go to the movies, they wanted to be famous.

Almost Done!

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.